It’s been said that life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes and, if we want to avoid sadness, we can’t resist them. The adage holds true in the world of social and digital media where the pace of change is constant. To succeed we must constantly change what we do and how we do it.

Keeping up is not easy. It takes time and resources. Understanding and managing an ever-expanding set of digital channels can be a 24/7 process. It takes digital knowledge along with solid marketing and communications experience.

Your strategy is off (or non-existent)

Surprisingly, one of the most common roadblocks to social media success is a lack of strategy. A social media consultant starts with an assessment of the alignment between social media activities and business goals and objectives. Tracking follower growth, likes, clicks and impressions, is an important part of social media management, but it’s not goal setting. To drive business progress, social media objectives need to be tied into the organization’s strategic plan.

You’re doing things wrong

An outside consultant brings a fresh perspective. The social media expert will identify the activities that hold a client back.

One company needed to engage millennials for campaign success, but was struggling to build a following on Instagram. It turns out a personal profile had been set up. This limited how Instagram could be used. It meant no promoted content, a limited use of stories and no analytics. Converting the profile was an easy fix and the company saw immediate gains.

Another company was failing at getting earned media coverage, despite using reputable newswire services to distribute its news releases. The new approach was to develop relationships with some online influencers with large and loyal social media followings. Focusing on high-impact, high-value relationships turned things around for this campaign.

You’re doing the wrong things

Companies often focus a lot of resources on three or four major channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, because that’s what they know. But there are hundreds, thousands even, of social media channels and platforms each one serving its own niche and purpose. A social media consultant has a deep knowledge of these and can recommend better ways of reaching the right targets.

One company had spent more than year updating and promoting its Facebook page, but wasn’t getting the engagement needed to raise awareness of important policy issues. The problem was the target audience, researchers and academics, was not taking part. The combined solution included influencer outreach and content curation. Soon productive online conversation about important issues was taking place.

You’re doing the same things

Most companies don’t do enough monitoring and don’t understand the data. That’s why they fail to make incremental adjustments on the fly. Being nimble and making changes as you go is important to social media success. A social media consultant has the tools and knowledge to track progress and analyze and understand trends.

One company had a lot of organic activity on its Facebook page. The analytics revealed that Facebook wasn’t referring any traffic to the website and so no online lead generation from a highly-engaged community. The answer was to adjust calls to action in Facebook content and put in place a targeted ad campaign. Almost immediately Facebook became the main driver of website traffic.

Want to get real business benefits from social media? Contact me to set up a time to chat.

According to Wikipedia a word cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to visualize free form text. This format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence.

Consultants often use word clouds in the analysis of conversations, online and otherwise, to help identify key issues, trends and opinions. Word clouds are a sexy way to visually display what can be highly complex discussion threads. They display the most frequently used words in larger type while less frequently used terms are smaller. It’s so very simple, yet so very useful.

Wordle is one popular free tool to create word clouds. It’s very easy to use and creates attractive graphics with numerous variations including colour, font and form (circular v rectangular). However, it has numerous limitations too. You can’t change the word list once a cloud has been created. For example if a respondent repeats the question asked in the answer (as is frequently the case) you can’t suppress those words which often gives an inaccurate representation of key words.

In communications, word clouds are best used in conjunction with ‘human’ analysis. For example, it takes a human to make the judgement about the overall sentiment of the data. Are positive words more prominently displayed than negatives ones? Are passive terms larger than active ones? Are there more nouns than verbs indicating respondent engagement levels?

Here’s a word cloud (by Wordle) of my last three blog posts about Facebook:

It would be handy to be able to suppress the word Facebook, because before the analysis even begins, we know the content is about Facebook. You can see my blog posts have a strong focus on ‘users’, updates and comments. Also the word ‘new’ is dominant, indicating my focus on reporting new Facebook developments. ‘Hungover’ is a red herring. It’s a term I rarely use in my copy, but did on one particular post about embarrassing updates. The tone is neutral with no strongly positive or negative words featured prominently. The style is somewhat passive; the use of nouns greatly outnumbers that of verbs.

Do you use word clouds? Let me know how and they are used in your work.